• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Republican Candidate Says Bad Guys won WWII

SLD

Contributor
Joined
Feb 25, 2001
Messages
5,647
Location
Birmingham, Alabama
Basic Beliefs
Freethinker

But, hey, don’t call us Nazis!
 
To be fair, the European Theatre was basically Hitler vs Stalin, and it's a stretch to call either any kind of "good".

The reason that Russians still call Ukrainians "Nazis" is that many felt that Hitler was preferable to Stalin, and chose to take up arms on the German side.

That choice seems odd to people raised on a million war movies, novels, comic books, and other tales in which Nazis are portrayed as the ultimate evil; But to a Ukrainian in 1941-2, before any of that post-war myth-building, it seemed very reasonable to support any invading army (particularly one that was clearly winning), against the regime that had killed millions of your countrymen, and likely many family members or friends, less than a decade earlier.

Lots of Ukrainians in 1941-45 were fighting for the Germans; Few were commited National Socialists, but all were commited anti-Stalinists, and if you wanted to fight Stalin, in Ukraine, in the early '40s, the Wehrmacht was the only game in town.

As always, it's dangerous to try to reduce a very complex history to a sound-bite.

Certainly, the "Good guys" won WWII, insofar as they liberated Western Europe. But equally, the "Bad guys" won WWII and imprisoned Eastern Europe.

Given that the UK and France started the war in order to free Poland, and that the US entered the European Theatre at the behest of the UK (and presumably therefore in pursuit of the UK's war goals), it is fair to say that the "Good guys" lost - though they lost not to Hitler, but to Stalin (who was Hitler's willing ally in the carving up of Poland from 1939-41).

I would presume political incompetence, rather than malicious support for Naziism, from Royce White in this case, based on the article.

Any candidate attempting to introduce nuance into a discussion of WWII is politically incompetent. Indeed, it seems foolhardy in the extreme for any US political candidate today to even talk about WWII, given that it was eighty years ago, and that the popular modern understanding of it is one of a black and white morality tale, in which the Noble Americans were stabbed in the back by the Evil Germans, who bombed Pearl Harbor, but then were smashed by the mighty US of A, with a tiny amount of help from the English, who kept a stiff upper lip and provided a staging post for the American led destruction of the Nazi hordes.

The Russians weren't even involved, probably, but if they were, they would obviously have been one of America's enemies. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
 
Back
Top Bottom